Equipment purchased by a customer may require support from a seller of the equipment. Furthermore, equipment requires services to repair or replace parts of the equipment that are malfunctioning or no longer functioning. Remote services and support for the equipment has a three level operational escalation model: (1) local level, (2) regional level, and (3) global level. A local level engineer is generally onsite or very close to the equipment site. A regional level engineer is typically offsite is and is very experienced for the particular piece of equipment. A global level engineer is typically offsite and is an expert in all the equipment making up a factory.
When the equipment has failed or there is an imminent likelihood of the equipment failing, an engineer at the local level opens a trouble ticket. If the local level engineer can solve the issue, the local level engineer performs the necessary corrective action and closes the trouble ticket. If the issue is not solved by the local level engineer within a specific amount of time, the trouble ticket automatically gets escalated from the local level to the regional level. Depending on the time of escalation, the trouble ticket gets escalated to the region that is running their day shift. If the regional level engineer is not able to solve the problem, the issue is escalated to the global level. The global level engineer may determine that a local level engineer must be dispatched to the site of the equipment with instructions from the global level engineer for fixing the problem.
The engineers at the regional and global levels have access to one or more log files created by the piece of equipment. The engineers may also access a server to search for a similar issue that might have occurred and been solved in the past for the piece of equipment.
In order to investigate the problem at the regional and global levels, remote capabilities must be used to perform troubleshooting, such as remote secure access to the equipment computer, equipment log files, equipment sensor data, etc. However, due to custom architecture of equipment, the log files provided by the piece of equipment vary depending on the piece of equipment. The size of the log files as well as the variance in the log files may slow down the response at the regional and global levels. Furthermore, the down time for scheduled maintenance of the equipment and the down time for unscheduled failures of the equipment may occur within a short period of time, thereby causing an inconvenience to a user of the equipment. In one example, a piece of equipment takes one hour to cool down in order to perform corrective actions, one hour to perform the corrective action, and one hour to warm back up again to perform operations. If a scheduled maintenance of the equipment occurs on a first day, the equipment would be down for three hours. If an unscheduled down time occurs the next day), the equipment would be down for an additional three hours, for a total of six hours of down time across two days.